A message from Andrew Rasiej, Tech President's Publisher

Thank you for visiting techPresident, where politics and technology meet. We’re asking our readers to help support the site. Let us tell you why:

Since 2007, we've expanded techPresident's staff and daily work to exhaustively look at how technology is changing politics, government and civic life. To provide the independent and deeply informed journalism we do, we need to find ways to support this growth that will allow us to keep the majority of our content free.

#OccupyWallStreet Has Grown 25% a Day Online Since Saturday; #OccupyColleges Next?

However we slice the data, the #OccupyWallStreet movement is still growing incredibly fast online. Of the original 201 "Occupy X" Facebook groups that we had identified as of 4pm EST Tuesday October 4, two days ago, the number of people signed up has vaulted from 384,889 to 480,079 as of 6am this morning. That's a 25% growth rate, matching what we've seen since we starting monitoring the explosion of Facebook groups last Saturday. Our larger dataset of 461 groups (which leaves out any group with less than 6 members) shows 633,606 "likes" in all, up about 20% from yesterday.

On Meetup.com, where OccupyTogether has urged people to shift their organizing efforts, there are now 541 cities represented, double yesterday's number. It should be noted that the Meetup Everywhere tool makes it ridiculously easy to start a new location for an event and so these numbers are about a mile wide and just an inch deep, with most cities' Meetups showing only a few members so far.

Not surprisingly, the #OWS movement has spread rapidly to college campuses. Seventy-five schools were listed as organizing walkouts yesterday but the actual number of participating institutions has not been confirmed. Angus Johnston of the blog StudentActivism.net was liveblogging reports of student walkouts yesterday and says about a third were from private universities, which he says is unusual.

Right now, the OccupyColleges group is debating on Facebook and Twitter when the next national day of walkouts should occur, October 15 or November 1.